'War: What Is It Good For?' by Ian Morris

"War!What Is It Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization From Primates to Robots," by Ian Morris

"War!What Is It Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization From Primates to Robots," by Ian Morris

Photo: Farrar, Straus And Giroux

Photo: Farrar, Straus And Giroux

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"War!What Is It Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization From Primates to Robots," by Ian Morris

"War!What Is It Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization From Primates to Robots," by Ian Morris

Photo: Farrar, Straus And Giroux

'War: What Is It Good For?' by Ian Morris

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War: What Is It Good For?

Conflict and the Progress of Civilization From Primates to Robots

By Ian Morris

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 495 pages; $30)

This is an oddly ebullient book given its focus on something whose centerpiece is lacerated human flesh and the destruction of human families and their surrounding communities. But Ian Morris' cheerful tone is buoyed along by his bottom-line message: War is a practice that has brought human society ever closer to order, peace and the trade that brings affluence, and may even soon bring an end to war itself.

War used to plague humankind, killing significant proportions of early hunter-gatherers - 10 to 20 percent, claims Morris, a history professor at Stanford. This last century, by contrast, saw just 1 to 2 percent of the world's people die as a result of war. How did this putative reduction of individual risk come about, by Morris' lights? Fighting war requires the marshalling of power and resources in ways that helped create states. Those states imposed peace on the ever-larger territories they controlled. And the resulting peace was the primary condition for the growth of trade and prosperity.

As with his fellow neo-Hobbesians - Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Samuel Huntington and others - Morris' argument hinges on the claim that a universal human nature has from the beginning of civilization provided the impetus for war. Like ants and chimps, human impulses to territoriality have led them to kill each other for payoffs in resources and safety.

The main producers of the purported decline in violence emerged as a result of population growth and the rise of agriculture: They gave the advantage to absorbing other populations rather than exterminating them.

Pretty bleak stuff. Fortunately, most anthropologists practicing today would reject the idea of human beings or societies driven to any single behavior, much less to a complex social institution like warfare. Indeed, such ideas would be dismissed as a freshman mistake. And the central piece of evidence on which Morris builds his theory - the proof of Stone Age crimson tooth and claw - does not exist.

The Stone Age, with its fragments for building narratives of human development, has long been a site of some ideologically motivated imaginings. In it, people, including scholars, have often picked up only those fragments that they need to build their accounts of what it means to be human, whether peaceful or violent. So it is with Morris. To get his high prehistoric death rates, he uses rates among 20th century hunter gatherers who resemble our prehistoric human ancestors very little, pushed as they have been out of their original areas and armed to the teeth by traders among other violence-inducing conditions.All of this leads him to ignore the overall picture of prehistory in which war was absent in many periods and regions and in which mass violence only emerges with any regularity with the rise of agriculture around 10,000 BP. Before this point, humans lived in highly dispersed communities - there were an estimated 30,000 people in all of Europe. Because they were nomadic and few in number, people lost nothing by moving away from organized conflict rather than defending territory that held few fixed resources, constructions or attachments. Interpersonal violence there occasionally was, but physical anthropologists' overview of the unburied record in no way supports anything near Morris' 10 to 20 percent mortality claim.

Although Morris has done a formidable amount of reading across historical sources, those looking for an account of what actual wars of the past and present have been like and who has profited from them will go wanting.

While acknowledging that war is hell, Morris does so in a way common to much textbook military history: The bones are bleached, the blood is bloodless, the civilians and the grunts who die have no names. The armies who clash are led by the heroic or the dastardly, but usually by some named rationale and rationality rather than cupidity and hubris. When Morris gives us first-hand experience relevant to the argument, it is from his living room in Silicon Valley and from the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier on which he has been taken for a short ride by the Pentagon.

This book focuses on percentages and grand strategy rather than the human suffering and social consequences and distortions brought by war. Morris would join the hawks who argue that U.S. spending on war as a percentage of GDP has declined over the post-World War II period in justifying increased Pentagon budgets, even as the United States has had a ballooning and now over $1 trillion national security budget, enough nuclear and other weaponry to massacre every woman, child and man on the planet several times over, and spending priorities that leave us with a higher infant mortality rate than 44 other countries.

This book will get a wide reading by those who share Morris' extremist bent - it tells them that "The last best hope of earth" is a United States happily self-identifying as either empire or "globocop," threatening and waging war wherever necessary. Of the true threats to well-being - a U.S. and a globe impoverished in treasury and soul by endless war, and a new era, the Anthropocene, brought on by climate change - those readers will hear nary a discouraging word.